Posted on: October 11, 2008
Christina’s World, by Andrew Wyeth. 1948.
The painting haunts. She has Polio, but she thrives. She loves the warmth, the comfort, the familial bliss of that house in Cushing, Maine, and nothing will prevent her presence there. Not the long trek. Not the pain. Not the time. The time is hers. The journey is hers. She is used to all things. Pain. Time. Effort. And the painter senses that. He inhabits her for a moment and gives all of us Christina, by way of Beth, his wife. The wife of Wyeth. Every blade of grass is there or hinted at. Every form of struggle, love of landscape, love of home. Christina lives and dies in that house. It is her life.
Why is this not bleak? Why is this not lonely like the sea after the worst storms? If a person walks swiftly past this painting, they will see bleakness.…
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Posted on: October 8, 2008
The Visitor. Overture Films
Watched a very good film on DVD last night. The Visitor is a story about an emotionally repressed college professor in Connecticut, a widower who seems to have settled into his own level of depression and is just going through the motions. Until. Until he is forced to give a paper at a conference in New York City and discovers squatters living in his apartment. Two illegal immigrants, seeking a better life. A gifted drummer from Syria, played by Haaz Sleiman, and his girlfriend from Senegal, played by Danai Jekesai Gurira. Tarek and Zainab think they are living in the apartment legally, having sublet from a conman. Apparently, this is all too common. After some commotion, the couple leaves, but Walter, the professor, played by Richard Jenkins, goes after them and asks them to come back and stay. In subtle and profound ways, his life is altered from that moment on.…
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Posted on: October 7, 2008
Beautiful Vagabonds
I am not the piston in the flower or
The bulging seed throttled by pollen
But a separate figure expectant and
Cupped by the shape palms make
Holding sumptuously to the fragile
Killings – crickets, bees, and moths
The soulful water strider apparently
Impervious to deep mirrored waters
And the lotus lilies rooted in mire
Look up at me
Look into me
I am the wind-loving swallow
Lighter than the air itself
Rippling my whole transience
Renascent by the threat of rain
--by Desi Di Nardo
Previously published in the September 2008 Arts & Culture issue of Our Neighbourhood Magazine.
Desi Di Nardo’s work has been published in numerous North American and international journals and anthologies, performed at the National Arts Centre, featured in Poetry on the Way on the Toronto Transit Commission, selected by Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate, and displayed in the Official Residences of Canada.…
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Posted on: October 5, 2008
[Guest blogger du jour Tony Jones]
Master Po and Kwai Chang Caine
What’s the mystique about mysticism? (Or is the question itself just a misleading fork in the road, excluded middle term, dun leaves dead on a worm-ridden tree, as in “not seeing the forest for the … ”, regarding spirituality).
When I watched Kung Fu as a young child, then as now I was entranced by the mixture of action and the ambiance of a kind of deep inner peace that drove it. I think I missed the master-pupil “grasshopper” dynamic, but I was only two or three years old. But then again, I have never really been content with the notion of master and pupil, either in being a student, or in being a teacher. Of course, then I had absolutely no idea what the show was about on an intellectual level and would not have begun to be able to articulate it until late in high school, possibly.…
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